> > > If you are making hardware that goes between the CPU and the> rest of the world, then you can keep track of anything that's> going on with some hardware-software combination, external> to the chip you are analyzing. These things exist and they> are called emulators, even though most don't emulate anything,> they use the real chip, but provide the physical and logical> connections to the user. However, in the case of an already-made> machine, you are limited in what you can do on the machine> with software. For instance, to trap every memory access, you> would need a trap-handler and set all the memory to trap> on an access. This would a bit hard to do within the kernel> because all the code on that page would trap as instructions> were fetched. So, some mere "hook" won't do it, you need> a kernel that executes a kernel and I think one for Linux> already exists. So, before you get too involved, you might> want to check that out.

I must have been unclear. I was not suggesting adding hardware. I was suggesting that we could run Linux under Bochs, which is a software x86 emulator. Being what it is, hooks can be added to track "cpu activity" is it occurs within the emulator. This is all a simulation. The key idea I was suggesting was to log processor activity (of the emulator) and develop a viewer program which would help people visualize the activity.Bochs already has hooks. I could write a logger and a viewer.